The New Hero Volume 2

by ed. Robin D. Laws

  The bedroom was a pit. It looked like Stubby had spent most of his time here, unwashed and miserable. The sheets were twisted into a greasy knot on the bed. A stained blanket lay on the floor, half-buried beneath piles of dirty clothes. Books lined the shelves, but they’d been taken down and reshelved at random, pages spilling out of their broken bindings. Plates of rotting food and overturned mugs had been strewn throughout the place, giving the stench a wide variety of means of assault.

  I pulled my head back out and fought not to gag. As my head spun, I glanced around the rest of the apartment. The only clean thing in it was a door that sat in the rear part of the place, the farthest from the grimy windows. The door was painted green and had a golden knob set into the center of it.

  “Where’s that go?” I asked.

  “Her office,” said Stubby. “She doesn’t let anyone in there.”

  I slouched toward it. “You haven’t tried it?”

  “Just the once,” he said, staring at the palms of his hands. “It gave me such a shock I never came near it again.”

  I knelt in front of the door and peered at it. I didn’t even see a keyhole for a lock in it. If she’d spelled it to keep out unwanted intruders though, the door wouldn’t need a lock, would it?

  I waved my wand at the door, and it glowed an electric blue from the central doorknob out past the edges of the frame.

  “What are you doing?” Stubby squeaked.

  “Just seeing what I’m up against. There’s a bastard of a charm on this thing.”

  He shook his hand as if trying to fling off a ghostly pain. “Tell me about it.”

  I stared at the door. With a protection charm like that, Moira could be as general or as selective as she liked when it came to who it would keep out. She might have only targeted Stubby, although I knew she was more paranoid than that. Most people just set up the charm to zap away anyone who wasn’t them. It made it tricky to get into if the owner wasn’t available, but not impossible.

  Still, I didn’t have the time to undo the damned charm. It would take me hours that Moira didn’t have. The penalty for murdering a noble—especially someone from a clan as powerful as the Selvaggios—could only be death. Every minute Moira spent in the Garret was another minute’s worth of torture for her to endure until her coerced confession, another minute closer to her execution.

  I reached out for the door.

  “Hey, wait!” Stubby said.

  As my fingers closed on the knob, the blue glow blinked away, retracting into the edges of the doorframe. It pulsed there, waiting for the moment it could flow forth again. For now, though, it would let me pass.

  I pushed the door, and it glided open on silent hinges.

  “Wait!” Stubby grabbed me by the shoulder.

  I glared back at him and fought an urge to hammer him down with my elbow. He let me go.

  “How come she let you in?”

  I moved into the room. “You’ll have to take that up with her. Right now, though, I’m going to trust her judgment.”

  I closed the door behind me. Stubby threw himself against it and started pounding on it. Then the blue glow snapped back into place, and the pounding stopped, punctuated by a sharp yelp of pain.

  The inside of the room was as black and cold as a tomb. I waved my wand and uttered an incantation that made the entire shaft glow white from end to end. I held it up to push back the inky darkness.

  The room was little more than a hole carved into the mountain’s stony crust. It featured no windows and had no glow globes for illumination. Maybe Nit had set it up as a safe room for his daughter, a place she could to go escape from her enemies—or from his if they tried to get to him through her. There weren’t many things inside it at all, but I had to assume that Moira wouldn’t have bothered to store something inside there that wasn’t valuable or vitally important.

  The few things in the room had been set on shelves carved out of the rock or simply leaned against the bare wall.

  I found a stack of gold bars, a few sacks filled with coins, a small bag stuffed with diamonds, and some pieces of art I was pretty sure had been stolen from the Imperial Dragon’s Museum about six months back. Behind the art I found another small bag of red velvet that had not stones in it but a snowy-white lock of hair tied with a crimson bow. I stuffed it into my pocket.

  I also found a small glass hookah, the kind used for smoking drops of dragon essence. I knocked it off its shelf and then accidentally stomped it into dust as I stumbled about the place. I can be so clumsy when I need to.

  I reached for the door, and the blue light reeled back from my touch again. I put out the light on my wand, and then slipped out the door and shut it behind myself. The glow snapped back over the door again. With a dismissing wave, I let my spell that had exposed the charm expire, and the glow faded into invisibility again.

  “What did you find in there?” Stubby asked.

  I ignored him and started for the door.

  “Where are you going?” His voice rose with every word.

  “Get out of here,” I said. “Grab your things and go.”

  “You can’t kick me out of here.”

  I looked back at him as I reached the door. “Within a few hours, Moira’s either going to come here and do it herself—or the Imperial Dragon Guard will sweep through here and either burn or confiscate everything in it.”

  Stubby blanched. “Where are you going?” he said. “No one can break her out of the Garret.”

  “I’m going upslope,” I said as I crawled out of the place. “I’m going to pay a visit to some of her friends.”

  It took a lot of fast talking and name dropping, but I’ve never been shy about either of those things. Soon enough, I managed to wheedle myself an audience with the Selvaggios I most wanted to talk to.

  “I can’t believe you let one of them in here.” Oscuro Selvaggio glared at me with ice-blue eyes, his perpetual snarl disfiguring what should have been a handsome face. “And after one of them killed my sister—your only daughter. Is our home no longer sacred?”

  I ignored the bigotry. I was a human in Dragon City. I was used to it.

  “Drop the revulsion act,” said Faustina Selvaggio, the matriarch of the clan. Despite being at least five times my age, she was impossibly beautiful and graceful in a way that made me embarrassed by every crude thing about me. “It doesn’t suit you.”

  “I came here to discuss the death of Chiara,” I said. “The wrong person was arrested for her murder.”

  “What do you know of it?” asked Faustina. “Word of her death has been kept under a tight wrap. Not even the Dragon Emperor has been made officially aware of it yet.”

  “Moira Erdini is a friend of mine. I was there when she was arrested.”

  “I’ll have to speak to the guard about being so lazy in the execution of their duties,” said Oscuro. “Without much of a struggle, I’m sure they could have found something to charge you with as well.”

  “Do you always rely on using trumped-up charges to get the guard to do your dirty work for you?” I asked. “I think I’m starting to see a pattern here.”

  The elf’s blade was out and at my throat faster than I could see it move. I scanned the walls of the room instead of giving him the satisfaction of flinching.

  This was likely the brightest room I’d ever been in at night, certainly one of the highest points on the mountain to which I’d ever aspired. We stood in a plain but beautiful natural chamber formed by the patient weaving of living trees into walls and ceiling. The southern face of the room lay open to the thin and chilly air that often seemed to blow straight through the tiniest seams in the woven branches. While it didn’t bother the two elves in the room with me, it was everything I could do to stifle a shiver.

  From our vantage point, I could see the lights glowing like distant stars in most of the southern portion of Dragon City as it splayed out below us, sprawling all the way down the mountain’s slopes until it reached the massive Great Circl
e, the giant curtain wall that enclosed the entire mountain and protected us from the undead dangers that hungered beyond it. I’d been born and raised here. The glowlight glittering off Oscuro’s long thin blade reminded me that I’d probably die here. I just hoped it might be a little later.

  “Desist.” Faustina spoke with an edge in her voice that seemed sharper than Oscuro’s sword. He resheathed his weapon as quickly as he’d drawn it.

  “I’ve known Moira for a long time. She’s many deeply disturbed things, but she is not a killer.”

  “And we are to simply take the word of someone like you for that?” Oscuro rested his hand on the hilt of his blade still.

  “No,” I said. “Of course not. Why would you?”

  Faustina cleared her throat. “I, for one, would like to learn the truth of the matter, no matter how it may come to us.”

  “The truth is simple to see,” said Oscuro. “That filthy halfling creature hooked my beautiful, darling, beloved sister on illicit drugs and then killed her with an overdose.”

  “Or not.”

  “Explain yourself,” said Faustina.

  “Let’s be honest. Most of the elves in this city are doing drugs of one kind or another. Something about relieving the ennui, I believe.”

  Oscuro began to object, but Faustina cut him off with a chop of her hand. “Continue.”

  “Chiara had been doing drugs for centuries. For some reason, she needed a new supplier. That’s where Moira came in.”

  “So you admit it!” said Oscuro.

  “That Moira brought drugs to Chiara?” I shrugged. “I suspect so, but I don’t know for sure. That’s not the important part though. As old as Chiara was, as much dragon essence as she’d probably used over the centuries, you don’t think she knew how to get high? Without killing herself?”

  “So it must have been murder,” Faustina said, lowering her eyes. “I don’t see how this helps the case of your friend.”

  “Of course it was murder,” I said. “But it wasn’t Moira who did it.”

  Oscuro began to object again, but a glare from his mother cut him short.

  “Figure this,” I said. “Chiara had to be Moira’s biggest customer. Moira would have seen her as a gateway to supplying other gold-drenched elves with Kai’s product. What would she gain from killing her?”

  “She’s vermin,” Oscuro said. “What other reason does she need?”

  Only Faustina’s presence kept me from punching the smugness off Oscuro’s face. That and the fact he’d have sliced me to pieces. “Like I said, the drugs aren’t important. It’s what happened after she started coming here.”

  “What do you mean?” Faustina said, intrigued.

  “Moira and Chiara fell in love.”

  Oscuro scoffed at this, a little too hard. “Preposterous! To think of a Selvaggio partnering with a halfling? It’s just absurd.”

  I pulled the red velvet pouch from my pocket, and I opened it up to spill a snowy-blonde lock of hair into the palm of my hand.

  “That’s not hers,” Oscuro said. “You could have gotten that from anywhere.”

  “It’s elf hair for sure,” I said. “Too fine and silky to belong to anyone else.”

  “There are many other elves in the world.”

  “Silence,” Faustina said. She held her hand out for the lock of hair. I deposited it in her palm.

  She brought it closer to her eyes and examined it in the moonlight.

  “Mother,” Oscuro said, “you can’t possibly—”

  “And why wouldn’t I?” Faustina said. “You children think that because you have the privilege of your birth you can fool anyone? I can hear you talking to each other at night through the walls.”

  “That proves nothing.” Oscuro favored me with a devastating sneer. “She could have taken that when she killed Chiara.”

  Faustina ignored him and held me in her steady, brilliant gaze. “But if your little halfling didn’t kill Chiara, then who did?”

  I didn’t know for sure. Honestly, I didn’t know at all. I just decided to play a hunch.

  “It was you,” I said to Oscuro. “You waited until a night she’d had a bit too much, and you pumped enough extra in her to make it look like an overdose. Like an accident she was too smart to have.”

  Oscuro flushed, his pale skin turning a bright pink. “And why would I do something like that?”

  “Why not? Chiara, your beloved sister, was sleeping with a disgusting halfling—” Then I realized what Oscuro’s real reason had been. Why he’d been willing to risk everything, including the future of his family, on this murder. The timing—when Moira had first started up with Chiara, when she’d started supplying her—it all made sense.

  “You were jealous. Chiara slept with Moira,” I said, “instead of you. You used to supply her with dragon essence—probably had for decades—but she broke it off with you despite that and took up with Moira instead.”

  Oscuro went from pink to pale again. “I—I did no such thing.”

  Faustina’s face curled into a twisted and miserable thing. “Don’t lie to me anymore, Oscuro,” she said with as much composure as she could muster. “I could always tell when you were lying. You’ve been lying to me all day. Only now I know why.”

  Oscuro drew his blade and lunged at me. Faustina waved at him, and a gust of wind raced in from the window and slammed him into the room’s interior wall.

  “We can’t let this get out!” Oscuro bellowed over the roar of the wind. “We must kill him either way.”

  “If you let Moira go,” I shouted at Faustina, “drop the charges against her, I will make sure that none of the evidence in this case ever reaches the light of day.”

  Faustina lowered her hand, and the wind expired. Oscuro fell to the floor. “Tell me,” she said to me. “Why shouldn’t I kill you and let your halfling friend die?”

  Looking into her eyes, I knew this was a legitimate question, one for which I had better have a good answer.

  “Because I’m here to help you. How do you think I found that lock of hair? Moira knew that it might someday come to her word against someone else’s, so she squirreled things away against that. I found it in one of her safe houses. You can bet she has other mementos hidden around the city, each with their own bit of damnation for you and your family if they’re found. Which they will be, after her death.”

  I didn’t know if any of that was true, but it sounded exactly like something Moira would do. I just had to hope that this powerful elf matriarch might believe it too.

  Faustina stood as still as a statue, considering this.

  “Mother,” Oscuro said. His voice trembled as he reached for her.

  She spun on him, screaming. Her voice was so loud and brutal that he fell to his knees in pain and his ears began to bleed. Even standing behind her I had to clap my hands over my ears and plug them tight just to keep from joining him on the floor. When she finished, she drew another breath as if she might scream again. She held it when she saw that Oscuro had begun to weep.

  She turned back to me then. “You will go to the Garret to retrieve your friend. You will bring her home. You will tell her that if she strives to damage the reputation of my daughter or anyone else in my family—if she ever darkens the doors of my estate again—I will tear her inside out and feed her to the falcons.”

  She glared right through me. “Are we clear?”

  “As crystal.”

  I double-timed it out of there and hopped a flying carpet out to the Garret. By the time I got there, the warden had already gotten the word that Moira was to be released. I’d never seen a dwarf so astonished.

  Dawn broke in the east as I escorted Moira out of the cold, gray prison. The dew-coated city was waking up all around us. I could smell bread baking somewhere.

  Battered and bloodied but still unbroken, Moira staggered out of the place, weak on her feet. After a few steps, I picked her up and carried her to the waiting carpet.

  “Thank you, Max,” she
said, wrapping her arms around my neck and burying her tear-streaked face in my shoulder. “I thought I was dead.”

  “Hey,” I said, “we’re friends, right?”

  “I didn’t think you liked me.”

  “I don’t.”

  Among the Montags

  Robin D. Laws

  A hunched figure, draped in rags and bits of carpet sample, drags himself across the cracked tarmac of fucking Vaughan Mills. Cold wind slices across the damaged parking lot. It whispers of buddy cop movies, steroid scandals and Apple product launches.

  The man totters on gammy legs toward the safe end of the superstore complex. Before, his name was Wyatt Dean Moler. He used to be a professor of social work at the University of Toronto, with a PhD in community planning systems and development. Now he’s Cripple.

  Every place like this, he many times has thought, has a guy like him. All named Cripple.

  He’s making do without a cane. He had one, his original from Before, but then the motos took it from him. He’s tried to makeshift one from old boards and once a construction rebar, but they were never right. For a few days he had a shopping cart to lean on, but an old man’s not gonna hang onto a treasure like that for long. And sure enough some guy in a grimy red toque took it off him two days later, waving a .22 and claiming there was a bullet in it. Bullet didn’t matter; Cripple couldn’t stand a pistol-whipping, as was plainly obvious to both of them. Still, damnfool didn’t make it more than a hundred yards before a gang of jerseys jacked him for it and the pistol. Which he sure didn’t fire no bullets out of.

  That was before Smoky. Smoky wouldn’t have let no dirty-toque dickweed take Cripple’s shopping cart.

  Cripple makes it to the steeled-up door that bulwarks the entrance to the safe end. Above it looms signage in the shape of an enormous lake bass. The safe end used to be a giant sporting goods store, its focus fishing, hunting, and the outdoors. The huge fish on its sign is surreal enough in its original form that the semiotic winds have left it as is.

  Some say the fish is in the process of coming to life, or at least gaining animation. Occasionally opening its mouth. Goggling its eyes. That sort of business. Others say it’s not the case, but will become so if enough people believe it. Cripple is pretty sure that both statements are BS. It’s weird out here, but not that weird, not yet. Though based on prior events, who can say what can’t happen anymore?